Posted on 10/03/2007 6:37:44 PM PDT by dighton
Squadron Leader Terry O’Brien, who has died aged 91, was a brave and outspoken pilot who served with the Chindits and later flew many clandestine sorties in south-east Asia, experiences which he later recounted in a widely-acclaimed trilogy of memoirs.
O’Brien had completed a tour of operations flying bombers in England and survived the Japanese advance on Singapore and Java when he volunteered to join the 4/9th Gurkha Rifles assigned to General Orde Wingate’s Long Range Penetration Group, better known as the Chindits.
He was appointed the battalion’s air liaison officer and, after an arduous six-month training period, landed by glider with the advance party on a hastily prepared jungle strip east of the Irrawaddy river, deep behind Japanese lines.
He first helped to organise the expansion of the airstrip to allow Dakota transport aircraft to land with supplies before the Gurkhas set out on their patrols towards the Burma-China border.
O’Brien was responsible for establishing the dropping zones and for co-ordinating the essential air operations to keep the column supplied as the force marched through the jungle in the remote mountainous region of northern Burma attacking Japanese lines of communications and depots.
Much of his time on the march was spent organising and guiding the mule train that carried the column’s supplies and armament.
After almost four months, during which he contracted malaria and lost 70lb in weight, O’Brien and the remnants of his column returned to Allied lines having lost some 80 per cent of their force.
O’Brien’s native Australian scepticism and disdain for the pretensions of rank was accompanied by an acute intelligence and a deep concern for his men; and he could be very critical of independent operations and of some of their leaders.
Such operations, he maintained, were not always harmonised with the wider strategy or tactics of Allied Command and were very wasteful of life.
He always believed that Wingate and other leaders did not listen to advice, and delegated far too little to the men on the spot.
Terence Patrick O’Brien was born on November 4 1915 at Maitland, New South Wales.
As an 11-year-old he became hooked on flying after a spin in a bi-plane from the local racecourse.
He was working on a coconut plantation on the Solomon Islands when war broke out and paid his own passage to England, where he joined the RAF.
After pilot training, O’Brien was commissioned, and in April 1941 joined No 53 Squadron flying Blenheim bombers from St Eval in Cornwall.
Over the next few weeks he flew 30 operations, mainly against the French ports of Brest, St Nazaire and Lorient, where the German capital ships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were berthed.
By the time O’Brien had completed his tour of operations 16 crews had been lost.
The squadron had moved to Norfolk and re-equipped with the Hudson when O’Brien elected to start a new tour mainly involved in anti-shipping sweeps over the North Sea.
In November 1941 he volunteered to lead a flight of Hudsons to Singapore, arriving as the city was under unremitting attack, and joined No 62 Squadron, which lost five crews within a week.
The squadron was forced to evacuate to Java to continue operations against the Japanese, but nine more crews were lost and O’Brien was one of the few to escape from the island by boat and reach India.
For six months he trained reconnaissance crews near Bombay, but then came a call for junior officers to volunteer for special operations.
Claiming that his squadron leader rank was only temporary, O’Brien promptly demoted himself on his application in order to qualify.
After recovering from his arduous patrol with the Chindits O’Brien was offered a staff job, but he immediately volunteered to fly with a special duties squadron, established to service the various clandestine organisations working behind enemy lines.
In August 1944 he was appointed to command the Dakota flight of No 357 Squadron, flying from an airfield near Calcutta.
O’Brien flew many operations in search of tiny clearings in the jungle where he could drop agents and supplies; the clearings were often located in deep valleys surrounded by cloud-covered mountains and illuminated by a few small fires.
Based on his own experience of depending on re-supply from the air, he allowed nothing to deter him from finding these remote dropping zones, flying throughout the monsoon — often by night — all over Burma, Siam and northern Malaya. He habitually undertook the most demanding sorties, some lasting as long as 10 hours.
Some aspects of this work angered O’Brien, who felt that the jealousy that arose between different, isolated secret agencies often led to long and dangerous flights being unnecessarily duplicated. Plans were inevitably secret, and he was scornful of what he considered to be the competitive, even reckless, attitude of some of the organisations involved.
He frequently reminded the staff who instructed him on his missions from the comfort of their offices that aircrew casualties flying in support of the clandestine organisations were higher than amongst the men they dropped. In one of his books he was scathing about what he described as “a deeply scandalous waste of lives and resources”.
In June 1945 O’Brien was awarded a DFC. He was due for a rest, but asked to continue on operations.
As the war in Burma progressed he was called on to fly even longer sorties, some taking him into Indo-China.
On several occasions he landed behind enemy lines on rudimentary airfields to deliver supplies and agents and to evacuate the wounded.
He was awarded a Bar to his DFC for “his great skill, determination and outstanding powers of leadership”. The French Government awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star.
On his return to Britain O’Brien married, in 1946, his wartime fiancée, Timmie Bloch, who had been working for the Special Operations Executive.
When she was offered the job of managing editor of Vogue he decided to stay in England, where he became a freelance journalist.
In the mid-1950s he left for the Canary Islands, intending to buy a banana plantation.
On arrival, however, he decided that tourism offered a brighter future, so he built a small hotel on Tenerife. Five years later, after deciding not to send their sons to boarding school, he and his wife returned to England, where he trained as a teacher. He taught for 10 years before establishing, with a group of Spanish friends, a successful tile-importing company.
In retirement, using the detailed diaries he had kept during the war years, O’Brien wrote three books: Out of the Blue (1984), about his time with the Gurkhas; The Moonlight War (1987), which describes his flying in support of the clandestine forces; and Chasing After Danger (1992), about his experiences in combat over Europe and the Far East between 1939 and 1942.
They were described by one reviewer as “a remarkable trilogy… war writing of an unusually high quality “.
Terry O’Brien, who died on September 10, retained his inquiring mind into old age, mastering the internet and peppering his family in Australia with pithy e-mails containing advice, his favourite poems and sardonic one-liners.
What a guy, and if it took until 1945 to get a DFC with a record like that then he must have certainly upset a few people of higher rank !
May he rest in peace. Prayers for his family.
My (beloved) father beat him because he live to 93. But Terry O’Brien was definitely more of WW2 hero and may God bless them all and take them to heaven
These tough old birds. They aren’t being made anymore
Gotta love a guy who demotes himself to qualify for even more hazardous assignments.
I'll be glad when the freepathon is over. Those things are annoying!
It’s maddening to recognize a piece of music — something you’re heard heaven knows how many times — and struggle to place it, against escalating frustration. Mercifully it finally clicked: Gustav Holst, The Planets, Jupiter.
ping
They are out there...making their stories as we speak. We'll hear from them as soon as they solve a few more problems in the Middle East...and they will make their mark on the face of our societiy - as men better than we have now!
Always interesting to see something about the Burma campaign, which seems to be little known in the U.S. My father-in-law won his M.C. at the battle of Imphal, one of those key turning points of the war.
I'm going to have to go shopping. :-)
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